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sila: wow!! looks like the students got into it. i love the differences in terminology. very innovativesila: nice! Dini rocks. very brave of her to throw candy at stormtrooperssila: we love the skype sessions! and that photo is hilarious! hopefully we’ll be able to have more fun se…Hisham: Thanks, Daniel. The bases are downloaded from One Monk Miniatures but later minis have stands acquire…Daniel: Nice work! I’m hoping you might let me know how the bases go together?Roberto: Your blog is amazing!!!! Thank you!!!!!sila: we loved singing happy birthday to you!!! yay to cake and nasi rempah! oooh ask yong for the recipe …Edward: I had forgotten how magnificently snarky you could be. My bad.
I really do have to get to Malaysia so…

About

Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.

Despite the date on this entry, it has been a long time since the boy's 2 month birthday. It's been a crazy busy time, but definitely a wonderful, and exhausting time for Vin and me. Just look at this entry as a way to show some cute pictures of Rafe

The above really shows off his gray-green eyes and is one of my favorites.

J.J. Abrams' new show Alcatraz is sort of interesting. The premise is that on the day Alcatraz was shut down in 1963, everyone on the island disappeared into thin air from inmates to guards. In the present day, one by one the people who vanished are reappearing in and around San Francisco. And the returnees haven't aged since 1963.

A team led by Emerson Hauser (played by Sam Neill) is tasked with stopping the crimes perpetrated by the returning inmates, finding out where they've been for 50 years and who took them.

However I do believe the show can be improved by having the intro monologue end differently each time, like a Simpson couch gag.

On March 21, 1963, Alcatraz officially closed.

All the prisoners were transferred off the island. Only that's not what happened.

Not at all.

In lieu of "Not at all", the producers can also insert "Not by a long shot!", "This is what happened!", "Something else happened!", "No no no!", "Oh hell naw!", "No way, man!", "Nuh-UH!!!", "The island did it!" and "WAAAALT!"

I am in school. Second year plus change. Which means I am eligible for the RM200 book voucher giveaway for university students.

With voucher in hand, the boy and I quickly dropped by Kinokuniya Sunday morning before the overwhelming weekend herd shambled in. Without consciously deciding to purchase only horror books, we ended up with them anyway!

Irfan wanted the Hellboy and The Walking Dead books. I checked out the storylines online before deciding he was old enough for them. I also bought for him Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I grabbed for myself Charlie Stross' The Atrocity Archives because one day I want to play the Laundry RPG.

You'd think two hundred is a high number and could buy a dozen books, wouldn't you. Sigh.

Apart from some interior art I did for Wicked North Games' Azamar RPG supplement The Paradise Fragment - as seen in a previous post - I was also tasked with the painting of the cover for the book.

It took me three different tries to get it right. The floating city of Adrya Orth proved adifficult factor in painting it because I tried putting the city and a couple of characters before it in an action pose. This caused characters to partially block the city. Finally I just put more characters in the picture but positioned them further away, and voila:

The sequel to The Adepts Book 1: Furato will soon be released and here's the cover I painted for it. The blog entry about the cover for the first novel can be found here. Without further ado, here's the red-tinged cover painting for The Adepts Book 2: Empath, continuing the star spanning adventures of the powerful Adepts and their guardian Payan warriors. The novel will be on sale at the Amazon Kindle Store very soon.

A new commission for Ben Gerber's Encounters ~ Plots ~ Places Kickstarter project is a book. Well, I draw a book. You can't find this book at Barnes and Nobles because of its unearthly, eldritch and trickster nature. So you can probably search for it at Amazon.com.

The Queen of Air and Darkness is the title of T.H. White's second novel of his Once and Future King series. In the Star Wars universe, the Queen of Air and Darkness is a sabacc face card that possesses a value of negative two. There was a request on the Star Wars Artists' Guild by one "Lord Cygnus" of a starship in his Star Wars RPG campaign named The Queen of Air and Darkness which I picked up.

The ship is a heavily modified Corellian Engineering Corps YV-545 light freighter and this is how it turned out after about 90 minutes of work:

Here is the final interior artwork for the scenes in Azamar: The Paradise Fragment RPG supplement. Instead of including it with the group of artwork in the previous post, I shall describe how the illustration came into being using work-in-progress photos.

First, pencils are made for the half-page sized illustration. Something stalks the characters as one of them pushes open the strange stone door from a previous picture, then a dragon swoops down. Is it attacking? Is it warning the characters of something?

A close up on the partially inked artwork. Pencil lines are still visible with the inks - but you can't really see it thanks to the blurred photo.

A close up on the other half of the artwork. The details on the dragons are added using brushed ink.

The image is scanned, then GIMP is used to add ziptone / newsprint shade effects to the final black and white illustration.

Here are some interior artwork for the Azamar role-playing game's upcoming supplement The Paradise Fragment. Player Characters (PCs) are sent to the deserted and floating city of Adrya Orth on a mission and uncover a deadly secret. What is the secret? Don't look at me I'm just the illustrator, not the writer. However, the publisher's art order requested that a series of sequential artwork was created as if it was a comic and I had the discretion to direct the visual flow of the story if not the actual story.